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I was a boarding school product from the age of eight, and I hated it. Though I do have a theory that boarding school is good training for writers because it's so desperately lacking in privacy: you make space for yourself by having an interior life.
On my first night at boarding school, I felt entirely alone. I was shocked, frightened and intensely homesick, but I soon discovered that expressing these emotions, instead of bringing help and consolation, attracted a gloating, predatory fascination.
American fantasy is not a genre we think about too often. Sure, we are familiar with the worlds of English boarding school houses and castles and fairies, but true American fantasy, fantasy that is built on the land of this country, is hard to come by.
I went to a lot of different high schools. I had quite a sporadic schooling experience. I went to school in England briefly, to boarding school, and I went to a few different ones in Australia as well. I'm really lucky! I have friends in most countries.
I went through a period at boarding school when my coaches wanted me to switch to snowboarding because they thought I was no good at skiing. I was too skinny. I had terrible technique. They were saying I should be a snowboarder, and luckily, I resisted.
I was taken to a boarding school when I was four years old and taken away from my mother and my father, my grandparents, who I stayed with most of the time, and just abruptly taken away and then put into the boarding school, 300 miles away from our home.
There is a latent anger in a lot of people that went to boarding school at an early age. I was eight. And I loved it over the five years, but I think the adjustments for eight-year-olds are a lot. And I think it informs who you are for a long, long time.
At the time I learned drums, I wanted to be the drummer of Hanson. I wanted to be this guy because he was so young, and he was already drumming in the band, you know, so I just wanted to be like him. And later, I discovered hip-hop music at boarding school.
The only thing I wanted when I left school was independence. I had been at boarding school for many years. When you're boarding, nothing is your own and your whole day is scheduled. You're told when to sleep, what to eat and when. You have zero independence.
When I was 13, I won a scholarship to boarding school. My parents let me choose whether to go, and I decided I wanted to. Afterwards, I went to Cambridge to study law - in a way, I was carrying the academic hopes of my family, as Mum and Dad left school at 14.
I spent my entire childhood in the same town, in Kent. I went to grade school there. There was a boarding school that my mother taught at, called - appropriately enough - Kent School, that I went to. Yeah, pretty much my entire childhood was spent in that town.
She was just Ma, and I didn't grow up in some kind of acting dynasty: Orson Welles didn't come round and give me a piggyback; Vivien Leigh never read me a bedtime story. It was just my mum and our housekeeper, whom I adored, and after that, it was boarding school.
You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.
I went to boarding school from the age of eight - first to prep school, then to Eton. One thing that kind of education teaches you is community living: there's little retreat. That's why people come out of it and talk about lifelong friendships forged in the furnace.
I was planning to go into law or politics. I was well known for my public speaking. I went to an all-girl boarding school with uniforms. It was very posh for someone like me who came from a world where my parents showed beagles and sold dog products out of a yellow caravan.
I was sent to boarding school - a grim place. The only good thing the headmaster did for us was every Sunday evening in the winter he would show us films in the chapel. He couldn't afford a sound projector, so we saw silent films, which you could then still rent from photographic shops.
I can still remember the afternoon, on my 15th birthday, when I opened up 'The Virgin and the Gypsy,' D.H. Lawrence's novella, in my tiny cell in boarding school, and whole worlds of possibility opened out that I had never guessed existed. The language was on fire and sang of liberation.
When I was a kid, in a very white boarding school in England in the '90s, I had this sort of middle part that kids had - that sort of long, floppy hair. So I was always desperate to have long, floppy hair, and I would try and brush it and spray it, and it would just look like a Brillo pad!
Keeping with our family tradition of sending their children abroad for a couple of years, and aware of my interest in chemistry, I was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland when I was 11 years old, on the assumption that German was an important language for a prospective chemist to learn.
When I came back to Mumbai after boarding school, I was 16 and I picked up weight training and yoga. This is when I also started dance classes and Pilates and then I started doing different workouts every month. I am now proficient in kick boxing, gymnastics, classical dance as well as yoga.
I didn't have boyfriends until my late teens. I was at a girls' boarding school, and my stepfather disapproved of me going out with anybody. I never really came across any boys. When I did, one of them asked me out, and I was petrified. I felt like a fish out of water, and it was excruciating.
Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night.
Going to Watford at such a young age and leaving everyone behind and being around new people was very different for me. Adapting was a challenge. I was staying in a boarding school and in a different culture that I wasn't used to. It was very hard to adapt, build confidence and change my attitude.
I was born and grew up in Phoenix, and I left there when I was 17 to go to Interlochen Arts Academy - a boarding school in Michigan - for a year, and then I went to college for a year at The Boston Conservatory and landed the 'Spring Awakening' tour midway through my freshman year, which was pretty cool.
My parents sent me from Venezuela to the Convent of Our Lady, a boarding school in Hastings, which was horrible - like Harry Potter without the magic. Sometimes we went into town, and if we were caught chewing gum in our uniform, members of the public would take down our names and report us to the school.
I wanted to be a great white hunter, a prospector for gold, or a slave trader. But then, when I was eight, my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers, beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.
I remember joining a boarding school in the sixth grade. I was lazy, complacent, and fat. Suddenly, I realised that I had to fend for myself. That's when I discovered this drive within myself. For the first time, I ranked first in class, which was a miracle in itself. However, it didn't matter to my family.
I have been a frequent air traveler since I was a few months shy of my sixth birthday, when my parents packed me off to boarding school two plane rides away from home. Those days of being willingly handed from air hostess to air hostess as an 'unaccompanied minor' made me blase about the rigors of air travel.
I spent a lot of time in boarding school. This is something I will never do to my kids. I think if you're having kids, then you have to take care of them; otherwise, what's the point? There are many things that parents say are good for the kids, but the truth is they say that because it is good for the parents.
In the middle of my sophomore year, I was sent to boarding school, at the Cranbrook School for boys, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where I fell in love with Marilyn Monroe. I knew that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet she was in pain, in need. She was unhappy. I believed that I could help her.
I am an Air Force brat who grew up at various Air Force bases. I changed six schools in about five years and got stability for the first time when I was sent to a boarding school, Rishi Valley. I lived outside of a cantonment-style living and was among an eclectic mix of kids and got exposed to books and other things.
The first 'Polly and the Pirates' is about a prim and proper girl who gets kidnapped out of her comfy boarding school by a bunch of pirates that think she's the daughter of their long lost queen. In the course of the adventure, she discovers she has a natural penchant for swashbuckling, despite her sheltered childhood.
I don't agree with boarding school. It's not something that I would do with my children, but I think it's something that kind of exists in England in a traditional way, and you do form very close relationships with the girls you go to school with. But it is a strange thing to live in an environment which is solely female.
I drifted into acting. My grandfather had a house in Buffalo in which there was a stage, and his friends met every two weeks or so to put on plays. So it was natural for me to put on plays, too, when I went to boarding school. I put on everything in the drama - I was indiscriminate. I put on Yeats and Shaw and Lady Gregory.
I used to always look forward to my school summer holidays where Saba and I would go and meet bhai. It was exciting spending those two months with him. I always thought he was cool, with his long hair. We would watch him play cricket at his boarding school. He would take us out for dinner with his friends. Exciting times for a kid!
I guess if you have had a good education as opposed to someone who hasn't been to school, you start off on this journey having studied Shakespeare for years and years or studied classics. I suppose why people see this big divide - the boarding school boys getting all the roles - is because they feel like some people have had a head start.
Before I went to boarding school, I had never read a fashion magazine. I grew up on a council estate in London, and fashion magazines were a luxury item that weren't even on my mind. The closest I got to a fashion magazine was my cousin's 'Top of the Pops' magazines, where we would learn the lyrics to every song and put posters on our walls.
I wasn't a jock in school, and by the 10th grade, when I was in boarding school I was carrying water buckets for the girls' hockey team. I was the kid with long hair and glasses and acne trying to learn how to play guitar and piano in the music center. I was not an athlete past the age of 13 or 14 when they start throwing the ball really fast.